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Focus on Alignment
Aligning the technology budget with business needs is also tricky when the roster of projects and markets served is constantly shifting. At Modine, Harper and his staff have developed an unusual alignment technique. At an annual off-site meeting for IT managers, senior business management is invited in for grueling interviews on upcoming priorities.
Before the off-site, business managers complete surveys. "[IT managers] pair off and each take a business manager," says Harper, who interviews Modine's CEO. "One does the interview, and one acts as scribe so the interviewer can concentrate on the questioning." IT learns which business initiatives are important to senior managers in order to prioritize and budget for technology initiatives.
As a result of these interviews, IT became aware of senior management's interest in what Harper calls "a powerful corporate social trend where the line between customer and supplier is blurring. They want to touch your data. Your systems must be available, your info has to be current, and the whole thing has to be secured." Modine implemented business-partner portals from which a customer like DaimlerChrysler can access all Modine-related data through one secure Web page.
Efficient Manufacturing
With suppliers "trying to wean themselves from dependence on the [Big Three]," as Gartner's Piszczalski says, Sonnax Industries is lucky, according to Jeff Loewer, VP of planning and IT at the Bellows Falls, Vt., auto transmission company. With annual revenue of roughly $50 million, Sonnax has always focused on the after-market: that is, replacement and performance parts, not parts for new vehicles. So while to some extent its fortunes rise and fall with the health of the auto industry, the company isn't joined at the hip with U.S. automakers and isn't pressed to diversify.
That doesn't exempt Sonnax from price pressure, though; the company uses a manufacturing process in which new products are developed by teams on three continents. Most early-stage manufacturing processes, such as the casting of steel parts, are performed in India and Singapore. Nearly all parts receive final assembly and inspection in the U.S. Until last year, the company relied on a stew of applications for data flow. "We used a lot of Excel, e-mail and telephone," Loewer says. "But it was hard to pull useful information from all these different applications, and our growth forced us to look at a unified system."
A year ago, Sonnax implemented product lifecycle management (PLM) software from Lawrence, Mass., vendor Aras Corp. The software has improved project management, according to Loewer, especially accountability. "Aras has a [quality control] module that's drastically improved the way we track quality from our overseas vendors," Loewer says.
Auto companies may be racing to diversify, but cars aren't out of the picture yet. Sonnax implemented PLM to make its manufacturing capabilities scalable in order to bid for business from -- that's right -- automakers.
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